Is There Success In Idiocy?

WHO KNEW LITTLE JOSEPH LEVITCH WOULD BECOME WORLD FAMOUS?
 
He would also become a fixture in American households on Labor Day weekend.
 
But first, he'd have to get past that childhood illness.
 
It's hard to know what the illness was.
 
He would never speak about it.
 
All we know is that, repeatedly abandoned by his parents during his childhood, he was left in the care of his Jewish grandmother.
 
And grandmother's cure for the mystery illness has nothing on traditional Jewish penicillin.
 
 
INSTEAD, SHE PLIED HIM WITH BACON
 
Who knows where the long lost Jewish bacon cure has disappeared to, or when we lost it.
 
But as an adult, he admitted that in an attempt to ward off whatever disease it was that was attacking her grandson, grandma would cram little Joseph's mouth full of bacon.
 
In a different place and time, this might have led to a career as a professional eater.
 
"Megatoad" Matt Stonie holds the world record of 182 bacon slices in just five minutes. Six pounds. About 11 full packages of bacon. That was 2015 at Daytona, smashing the standing record set in 2010 by "The Human Vacuum" Mark Lyle, which was just 54 slices.
 
But Joseph didn't seem to have much interest in a career as a professional eater.
 
But he kept up his bacon regimen.
 
One celebrity friend, interviewed in GQ Magazine back in May, says he'd seen the guy sit down to breakfast, order 24 slices of bacon, and eat them all.
 
 
PROFESSIONAL EATING ASIDE, JOSEPH FOLLOWED IN HIS PARENTS FOOTSTEPS
 
The reason they left Joseph with his bacon-wielding Jewish grandma was because they had an itinerant lifestyle.
 
They were vaudeville performers.
 
Mom played piano.
 
Dad was a song and dance man.
 
Sometimes, little Joseph would appear in the act. At age 5, he launched his performing career singing, "Brother, Can you Spare A Dime."
 
But mainly, his parents left him with grandma.
 
It made him very insecure.
 
 
AND IT LED TO A MONUMENTAL PERSONAL BRAND
 
Determined not to be left behind, Joseph became ambitious and driven.
 
He began developing his own stage act.
 
As the spotlight continued to shine upon him and his fame grew, he was very shrewd about controlling his career.
 
Unlike so many in his profession, he kept a tight rein on the direction of his career and the ownership of his material.
 
He ultimately became a multimillionaire.
 
His energy could be frenetic.
 
He was endlessly creating.
 
When he was living in Los Angeles, his celebrity neighbors would find themselves drafted into impromptu film performances right in his living room.
 
The man who had once been insecure, bacon-stuffed little Joseph was very candid about his fame.
 
 
"I'VE HAD GREAT SUCCESS BEING A TOTAL IDIOT"
 
Yes, he said that. He called himself a total idiot.
 
Hard to know when or where he said that, exactly, because it has become pervasive.
 
It has even turned into an internet meme.
 
But it's impossible to argue either the success or the idiocy. At one point during his career, he was called the monkey to his peformance partner's role as the organ grinder.
 
But the "total idiocy" that built his success was fueled by tremendous insecurity.
 
It's probably one of the reasons that in his act, he was big and broad and usually playing to the back row.
 
He had eccentricities. Besides the bacon, that is. He never wore the same pair of socks twice. It's been reported that he'd change them four times a day.
 
 
AND HIS FANS LOVED HIM
 
At the same time, his critics hated him.
 
None of it changed the fact that he also cast himself as a great humanitarian.
 
For his humanitarian work, he was even nominated for a Nobel Prize.
 
In France, he was awarded a Chevalier in the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur, the highest order of merit that country can bestow. It's essentially a knighthood.
 
The French have lionized him as an auteur.
 
When you see someone with this kind of raging success, it's hard not to think, Wow. They have it together, don't they.
 
 
BUT AGAIN: A CAREER FUELED BY INSECURITY
 
The Fabulous Honey Parker and I have a friend who grew up in the northeast. He went to prep school and spent time living in New York.
 
At one point, he became friends with Joseph's adult son.
 
They visited dad backstage in his dressing room at a performance.
 
It seems they were sitting there, waiting for dad to appear, fresh form the stage.
 
Our friend describes the door opening, and being engulfed by a whirlwind of narcissism and insecurity.
 
He described it as overwhelming.
 
Meeting this world-famous multi-millionaire, all he can remember experiencing was the man's self-doubt, harsh self-analysis, and his need for affirmation.  
 
 
BUT WHEREFORE LABOR DAY?
 
Ah, yes.
 
Labor Day.
 
The holiday that spawned this train of thought.
 
For a quarter of a century, Labor Day was the day that this man would launch a crusade to help children for whom the secret Jewish bacon cure was not enough.
 
During his tenure as Labor Day's ringmaster, he helped raise over two and a half billion dollars for children in need of more than bacon.
 
It was a cause that he took personally, and to which he dedicated himself annually.
 
 
EVENTUALLY, THAT STAR WAS EXTINGUISHED
 
Bad press, accusations, criticism, outdated attitudes, fragmentation of TV viewership--many things contributed to the death of the Labor Day manifestation of the cause.
 
But for 45 years, The Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon was a fixture on American televisions.
 
But like the arc of little Joseph Levitch's career, it was a huge success that eventually became the punchline to a joke.
 
And little Joseph Levitch, whose stage name became Jerry Lewis, built a stellar career on the foundation of a personal brand infused equally with talent and insecurity.
 
If you didn't see the news, Jerry Lewis went to the great telethon in the sky just a couple of weeks shy of Labor Day, on August 20, 2017.
 
He was 91 years old.
 
 
SO WHAT ON EARTH WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH SMALL-BUSINESS BRANDING?
 
Funny you should ask that.
 
I was asking myself the very same thing when I stumbled upon the mystic Jewish bacon cure.
 
I wanted to know more about the childhood malady that Josephs' grandmother fought back with bacon.
 
Can I use it?
 
Will it help me?
 
I'm very pro-bacon.
 
But the more I searched, the less there was about the illness.
 
But the more there was about the carefully built brand that was Jerry Lewis.
 
The environmental conditions and the family dynamic that led to his success as a one-man comedy empire were fascinating.
 
And it got me thinking about how often the quest for perfection shoots a small-business brand in the foot.
 
 
"DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT"
 
That adage comes to us from the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.
 
And it shines a laser onto the hot spot that so often prevents a brand from ever getting off the ground.
 
Throughout my career working with small businesses in branding and advertising, it's impossible to count the number of branding efforts and advertising campaigns that have been derailed by fear.
 
Yet in Jerry Lewis, we have the sky-high success of a one-man brand founded upon and driven by fear.
 
Some might argue that the Jerry Lewis brand is built on cruelty and megalomania.
 
That's an easy, pop-psychology way to explain it.
 
It's also ignorant and dismissive.
 
 
NOTHING IS EVER THAT SIMPLE
 
But if you start peeking into the life that was Jerry Lewis, you see a flawed human being who built a quintessential small-business brand that eventually became world-famous.
 
He did it without venture capital.
 
He did it without a logo.
 
He did it without advisors or gurus or email marketing or sales funnels.
 
He did it purely through intellectual investment and sweat equity.
 
And, perhaps, bacon.
 
What's in your wallet? 

As always,
Blaine Parker
Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in
Park City
www.slowburnmarketing.co